Sitting in his idling F-150 pickup, Evan watched her through a rise of chain-link fence. He didn’t generally go near a client once he’d completed his mission, but he wanted to see her, wanted to be reminded of the good in the world.

A brief article had appeared online this morning. An American expat had been discovered in a high-end luxury condo in Zagreb along with a dead body. He’d been in terrible shape. The story had carried a single photo of the police leading him out.

The man looked to be in his nineties, his strawlike hair gone white, his loose skin bagging around his face, his joints angled arthritically. He hadn’t yet recovered his capacity for speech, and one of the physicians remarked that he didn’t know what the man could have encountered to have aged him so violently.

No one had any idea what had happened behind the gate of the high-end complex or whether it was related to the nearby street explosion that had claimed a life a week ago.

The school bell rang, the sound crisp in the November breeze. Evan drew in a breath of fresh air and watched Anna walk to class with a friend.

Maybe she wouldn’t bother finding the next client to pass on the Nowhere Man’s number to. The next client who would find the next client who would find the next. Evan found himself wondering if Anna might just let it go and move on with her life.

No.

Not wondering.

Hoping.

*   *   *

For the first time since he’d built the compound, Charles Van Sciver powered down the monitors. One wall at a time until all three had gone dark, his eternal horseshoe dimmed at last. The warmth of the screens vibrated the air, the afterglow of something just killed.

The act was largely symbolic. The computing power still churned in the banks of servers behind the concrete wall, and he could reignite the monitors at a moment’s notice. But sometimes symbolic was good.

Sometimes you needed to drench yourself in darkness.

In the darkness his thoughts and desires clarified. In the darkness the path ahead was illuminated.

It was time to leave the foxhole.

He prepared himself. Then reached for the telephone.

*   *   *

One of three heavy black phones rang on the Resolute desk. Fashioned from the timbers of the British frigate that was its namesake, the desk had been gifted to the United States by Queen Victoria. American seamen had saved the ship after it had been frozen in Arctic ice, and the desk had pinned down the oval carpet ever since.

The seal on this carpet was rendered in bas-relief like Truman’s, the cut pile trimmed to different lengths to delineate the eagle and stars. It was monochromatic, shadows within shadows.

A handsome man in his fifties excused himself from the assembly on the couch, crossed to the desk, and answered.